Free Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen by Matthew P. Mayo Page A

the front. The assay office itself was filled with the usual clutter of equipment, including scales, sacks of ore bearing tags, and various bits of scientific-looking apparatus the fat man had never seen before.
    â€œMr. Dinsdale,” the dapper man leaned over the counter. “We have need of your services.”
    â€œOh?” said the assayer. “I certainly hope so. Otherwise, I’d be wondering just what it is you’re doing here.” He smiled and looked at each of the three men in turn.
    â€œMy acquaintance here would like to know if this brick of gold is indeed the real thing, the genuine article.” As he spoke he nodded to the Mexican to set the precious bagged commodity on the counter.
    â€œI trust you will be discreet?”
    â€œIf that means will I keep my mouth shut about what it is you’re showing me, well yes, I will. I wouldn’t be in business all that long if I couldn’t, now would I?”
    â€œVery good.” To the fat man the dapper man said, “He’ll have to cut out a portion of the brick in order to test it accordingly.”
    The fat man nodded in agreement to these terms, and the man behind the counter carved out a chunk of gold from the brick, then went through the chemical process required of the assayer’s art. The piece tested high—the quality, it seemed, was as good as the gold bar’s looks led the quivering rube to believe.
    The fat man didn’t catch himself doing it, but the dandy saw the out-of-town businessman lick his lips. The dandy suppressed a smile, knowing the hook was set, the fish was almost landed, and soon, one of them would be richer, and one poorer.
    Within the hour, the dapper gent had kindly escorted the portly visitor to Denver to a bank where he was able to retrieve cash, borrowed against his reputation as owner of a rather large freighting concern.
    It wasn’t until the fat man was on the train and nearly back to his home town of Wichita that he discerned his wonderful bar of gold was little more than a painted bar of carefully shaped stone. He suppressed a groan, closed his eyes, feeling a throbbing in his temples and a tightening deep in his gut as he thought back on the entire episode. He’d given a great wad of cash to a man he’d met in the street, and all for something that was too good to be true. Oh, but he should have known better.

    By the time Charles L. “Doc” Baggs had perfected the gold-brick scam—which he is credited with inventing—he was one of the best bunco operators of his day. And in the nineteenth-century West, that was saying something.
    Charles L. Baggs was born in Soda Bay, New York, on February 11, 1843. When he was sixteen he joined the rush to Pikes Peak, and had already decided that a life of office-bound drudgery was not only boring but painful. He’d recently lost a finger to the maw of a printing press while working in Illinois as a postal clerk. Baggs spent two months rummaging in and around the mines near Boulder, then decamped to Denver in early June 1859.
    He went on to serve in the US Army as a quartermaster before agenting for the Overland Stage Company. From there he ventured north to Virginia City, Montana Territory, where his attorney father, Charles Sr., was busy lawyering and serving as a member of the territorial Council. Ever droll, Baggs the younger was, years later, quoted as saying, while on the stand at a murder trial (as a mere witness), that of the three years he spent up north, toiling under his father’s thumb, he had worked a total of “several days,” and that the only swindling he had engaged in was “selling mines.”
    For a man who, by his own admission, was arrested “about a thousand times”—and who are we to not believe the claims of such a fine, upstanding citizen?—Doc Baggs was never convicted of a single bunco crime.
    As with many of his conniving cohorts in the field of